


i come here to be what you need (so you can fly)

by sapphicish



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Obsession, Unrequited Love, and ive written some pretty niche couples, this is by far the nichest couple ive ever written, zara hates marie's son and rightfully so!, zara is the goth serbian gf of my dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 17:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19338766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: Zara's always been the last one standing, proud and hard, until now.





	i come here to be what you need (so you can fly)

**Author's Note:**

> listen...i write what i want to read because no one else will do it for me :(

“Oh, God,” Marie says warmly, the first time they meet, something arranged by a mutual friend. She's grabbing Zara's hand and turning her arm up wrist first, pushing her sleeve back, running her fingertips over the black lines and curves of Zara's tattoos. “These are beautiful.”

“I can give you one sometime,” Zara says, thinking about the needle on Marie's skin, the quiet buzzing next to her soft breathing, the little flinches of someone who's never gotten a tattoo before.

Marie laughs. “I'm not much of a tattoo girl, but I'll keep it in mind. I thought you'd be taller, you know. Vladimir made it sound like you were well over six feet and had biceps as big around as my head.”

“Vladimir is a _pička._ I thought you'd be shorter,” Zara says. Again that laughter, sweet and ringing.

They shake hands at the end of the meeting, and Marie's palm is warm where hers is cold, and she stands out in the parking lot of the restaurant, watching the other woman drive off until her car is just a speck of color in the distance.

Then she calls Vladimir and asks for Marie's phone number and address.

He laughs. “I knew you two would get on like a house on fire.”

Zara likes that.

“Yeah,” she says. “Like a house on fire.”

  


  


The first time they sleep together – _sleep,_ not fuck – it's the first time Marie leaves the hospital after Danny's attack. The doctors force her out, with kind and professional tones of voice that say _I don't actually give a shit about your plight, just get out of my hospital._ She hears it and it makes her want to scream, the way they tell her about how he won't be waking up when she's gone so she can come in early in the morning and see him again, and if there's any news she'll be the first person they call. The way they look at her – with sympathy and pity and whatever else, but like she isn't really there, like she's just another mother of just another patient, practically invisible to them.

Visiting hours, they say more than once. She knows that if she keeps it up just a little while longer, persists just a little more, stands her ground, she'd be allowed to stay. But she's so tired, and the beeping of the machines is making her sick, and the sight of Danny pale and washed out, his head wrapped in bandages, makes her want to rip all her hair out.

So she goes.

Zara flies from Sydney first thing, and she sits outside Danny's room the entire time Marie's in, making calls to settle the business deals that she'd left behind in a hurry. When Marie steps out, legs aching from sitting in the same chair at Danny's bedside since morning, Zara is speaking in rapid strings of Ukrainian to someone on the other end of the cell pressed to her ear.

She isn't fluent, not as much as she'd like—but she doesn't need to know any of the language at all. It's there when Zara looks up at her, when she immediately hangs up with a curt goodbye and stands to ask her if she's alright, touching her on the arm for a little too long.

She's staying. Even if Marie asks her to stay forever.

She might. She might do that, just here and now.

The halls around them are long and bright and white, and Marie feels weak on her legs, so even though she wants to yell at Zara, wants to yell at anyone, she doesn't. “Drive me home,” she says instead, and Zara does.

When they get there, Marie kicks her heels off and stands there in the foyer, looking into the mirror on the wall. Red, bloodshot eyes stare back at her, the skin around them raw from crying; the skin of her nose and cheeks are flushed, her lips swollen from biting them. She takes off her bracelets and her necklace, takes out her earrings, pulls her hair from its bun. Zara stands behind her the entire time, like a black specter, waiting.

“Stay,” Marie says, and Zara does.

She takes a shower, so long and hot that she feels like she's going to faint by the time she finally steps out.

Zara's waiting for her downstairs, sitting at the end of the lounge and staring at the blank TV screen. It's her spot. It always has been, whenever she came over, it was hers. No one else looked right there. And Danny always took the other end, and Marie took the middle, and—

“Come here,” Marie says, and Zara takes her outstretched hand and walks up the stairs with her.

She doesn't want to dry her hair, which is still wet, and she doesn't want to dress, and she doesn't want to talk. She crawls into her bed wrapped in a towel and closes her eyes.

“Come here,” she says. “Hold me.”

Zara climbs into the bed next to her, wraps an arm securely around her waist, and pulls her close.

They do that every night for two weeks, and then Zara presses especially close one night and tries to kiss her.

Marie stops inviting her up into the bedroom then, and neither of them talk about it again even though she wishes Zara would, a little, wishes that she would bring it up, just once, so that they can talk about it and then go back to normal, because the other girls who Marie keeps in her bed aren't the same, they aren't _Zara._ They don't understand.

They don't love her the same.

  


  


Zara had never liked Danny. Never saw in him what Marie did, which was the sun and moon and stars, like he was the perfect thing, the perfect creation even though she kept him at a manageable distance, and busy with Zara, with Allie, with her other girls. Zara didn't believe in perfection, and she didn't like it when it supposedly came in the form of a child, a boy, someone she was forced to pretend to care about for someone else, someone who looked at her the way Danny did – like he was above her. It made her skin crawl. It made her want to hit him, and get that smirk off his face. It was what she would have done to anyone else. But she had been willing to pretend. For Marie. She had been willing to seek vengeance. For Marie.

When he was a child she would toss a ball around for him. For Marie. She would ruffle his hair like people did when they cared about a child. For Marie. She let him call her Auntie Z because Marie thought it was cute, and she forced something closer to a smile than a grimace onto her face when he asked questions like _are you a vampire_ or _why do you always wear long sleeves_ or _why do you always wear black_ because Marie always laughed at those questions even knowing the answers and the reasons. She would go to his games when Marie couldn't (she usually couldn't), and even a few times when she could, because Marie invited her personally and she never enjoyed the games like she enjoyed them then, watching the radiant joy spread across Marie's face as she stood and cheered and clapped, the only voice in the stands Zara ever paid any attention to.

“You like my mum,” he says, once.

Zara looks at him evenly. “I love her,” she says, because she knows it and Marie knows it and now he does too and it doesn't matter, wouldn't ever matter. She could – and would – say the same thing to whoever asked, so that the whole world knew that she loved Marie so much more than she could possibly describe, so that the whole world knew that she wasn't ashamed of it.

He thumps her on the back. “Sorry,” he says, but in a way that suggests he doesn't really care at all.

“Yeah,” she says, and they never talk about it again.

(Here's what Zara could say instead: _don't be sorry. I'm not sorry. You're a pretentious, spoiled cunt and you don't understand._

She knows it's love early in their relationship when she starts thinking about Marie every morning and every night, when she starts dreaming of her – not the dreams where she's fucking Marie or being fucked by Marie, because she's had those from the day after they first met and that isn't love, it's plain base lust. No, it's the dreams where Marie is just standing there, beautiful and smiling, and the air is warm and sweet with her perfume and she lets Zara lean over her, hands on her hips. She leans back and kisses Zara and her hair is soft when Zara touches it the way that she's always wanted to and she wakes up, her lips tingling.

She could say that. She could say that she doesn't know why she's always the one being fucked in these scenarios, not the other way around, she doesn't know why she imagines Marie treating her like one of her girls, like Allie, like something precious. _Do you know why that is, Danny?_

Or she could say that she knew it was love when she started hearing Marie's voice in her head when they were apart, calming her when she wanted to break somebody's jaw, which was at least twice a day. _No,_ the voice would say, _we talked about this, Zara._ And the urge wouldn't go away, to split her knuckles open on the nearest hard surface if she couldn't even break someone's bones, but she wouldn't do either of those things because the voice had said so. She knew it was love when she felt herself grow a little whenever Marie did so much as give her a pat on the arm or a glance of explicit approval. Sometimes she could even see fondness there, beneath everything.

She could say that she knows why Marie doesn't love her, maybe doesn't even like her (most of the time) sometimes. _It's because I'm the ugly drooling beast she gets to do her dirty work, right,_ she'd say. _I'm the monster. She's above me even though she's the one that relies on me. I could leave her and she'd have a whole chunk of her life just cut out, just gone. Like ashes to the wind. But I won't. She'll keep kicking me in the ribs and I'll come back. I'm her dog._

She definitely won't say that, because Danny would laugh and agree, and then she'd have to smack him.

(She's never smacked him.)

(She's always wanted to.)

(But it's easy not to. Just think of Marie's disappointment. Marie's anger. Marie.)

She could say: I love your mother because it's like running into a rush of afternoon traffic on purpose so you can feel your bones get crushed. Knowing that when you're a broken, bloody fucking mess in the street, everyone is a witness to your plight, everyone is listening to your screaming and writhing, and they don't even remember it the week after because they're too busy in themselves.

That's what loving her is like.

Zara could say that she loves it. Because she does. It's thrilling, the sensation that grips her when she sees Marie. It's better than everything – better than a good fuck, better than the best fight.

She could say that.

But Danny, the little shit, has too short of an attention span to listen to all of that, and she isn't sure if she'd say it even if he was willing to listen, because she knows how it would sound.

Idiotic.

So she says, thinking of Marie and her smile and her hair and the way she smells and her teeth and her hands and her voice: _yeah._ )

  


  


Zara only has the realization that she's going to die when she's on the ground choking on her own blood, seeing colors flash behind her eyelids.

There's something broken, and the pain is starting to fade, and the lights overhead swim in reds and yellows and blues and reds and reds and –

It's for Marie, the way it's always been. She's dying for Marie.

It's love. That's love.

Zara thinks she might be smiling.

Then Rita Connors' fist comes down one final time, and the colors stop.

  


  


Marie has her own funeral for Zara, when she gets out of the slot. In the dark, after the count, she lights an unscented candle Will brought for her and stares at the flame, flickering away, looking at the waxy slope of the candle and the way it stretches a shadow open slim against the wall. Marie cups her fingers around it, so she can feel the warmth.

She wants to be on the outside, wants to be at the real thing. She can imagine it when she closes her eyes. People laughing, celebrating Zara's life and death together the way she would have wanted, not just half. Celebrating the gory bits too, and then planning to kill Rita Connors in as brutal a way as Rita had killed her. There'll be so much alcohol that they'll all feel like vomiting for days after, the hard and cheap vodka that Zara liked that always sent Marie's head spinning.

Marie watched her drink several burly men with Ukrainian tattoos under the table, once, early in their friendship, and she was still standing long after they'd collapsed or rushed off to be sick. In a grimy pub, she'd been the center of attention and Marie had just been another fixture, standing aside, laughing and applauding her achievements.

It would have upset her, maybe just a little, but then Zara looked at her, only at her, only ever at her, and Marie had felt wanted and needed.

She always felt like that around Zara.

Zara's always been the last one standing, proud and hard, until now.

Marie's hands are shaking by the time the candle's burnt low, and she feels a little nauseous. She closes her eyes and imagines Zara's face, dark and grim, her lank black hair and the cold eyes that only ever softened around her. _I love you, Marie,_ she said, and then what?

She's gone now, and it's just Marie now, and she's all alone.

She drifts her fingers over the flame. It hurts not enough. She blows it out and watches the smoke die out in the air, breathes in the acrid scent. She digs her fingers into the melted wax, feels it sticking and burning. It cakes under her nails. She lays down on the bed, on her side, and clutches it to her chest, thinking, _this is Zara. This is all I have of Zara now._ This is her, the candle: tall, pale, dead. And even this will be gone tomorrow, because she isn't supposed to have a candle in her cell.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Marie whispers. She tucks the candle under the mattress, breathing in deep only for it to get snagged on a thread inside her.

 _Don't,_ Zara would say, looking at her the way she always did – like she wanted to kiss her, even in her worst moments. _You know I hate that. You drip all this snot when you cry. It's disgusting._

“Fuck them,” she says to the emptiness around her, her throat burning. “Fuck them.”

 _Fuck them,_ Zara's voice says agreeably. _You can do this on your own, Marie._

Marie closes her eyes and breathes.

In the morning, the candle is gone.

In the morning, Zara is gone.


End file.
